With old favorites like Ippolito’s and Darigo’s Fish Market, South Philadelphia has long been a mecca for the city’s seafood lovers.

But the neighborhood’s latest fishmonger may be its most novel — and not simply because it’s operated out of a high school classroom.

Meet Fishadelphia, the city’s first CSF, or community supported fishery.

Perhaps you’ve heard the acronym CSA (community supported agriculture) or signed up for one of the area’s many farm-share programs. The concept is pretty simple: Subscribers pay a flat fee and receive weekly shipments of vegetables, meat, or other products from local farms.

A CSF is like a CSA except — you guessed it — clients get a weekly shipment of fish.

There are only between 75 and 100 CSFs in North America and no pre-existing ones in Pennsylvania, according to the website LocalCatch.org. Fishadelphia, which dished its first weekly shipment last Friday, also stands out because it’s co-run by students at Mastery Thomas, a K-12 charter school in South Philadelphia.

Gov. Wolf asked the Pennsylvania General Assembly on Tuesday for $100 million more in basic education spending and $20 million for special education — his smallest request since taking office in 2015.

Wolf also proposed a $40 million bump in pre-K spending, $15 million more for the state’s system of higher education, and $10 million for career and technical education.

“Rebuilding our schools is the beginning of rebuilding our economy,” Wolf said in his budget address.

The relative modesty of Wolf’s proposal most likely reflects political realities, said education advocates. With the governor and his counterparts in the legislature facing campaigns for the November election, there’s little appetite for raising taxes.

“We’d like to see him be asking for more money for education funding, but we understand the practical realities,” said Marc Stier of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, a left-leaning Harrisburg think tank.

Pennsylvania's Gov. Wolf has changed his mind regarding a high-profile school funding lawsuit.

More than three years after a coalition of districts and advocates first sued the state, Wolf now says the courts should determine whether the commonwealth’s education funding system violates the state constitution.

And he thinks that decision should come sooner rather than later.

Wolf filed a brief Thursday asking for a case before the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court to move forward, a notable move because the governor — named as a defendant in the case — initially opposed the landmark lawsuit.

Even though Wolf has staunchly advocated for increased education funding — and even though the coalition that brought the suit includes some of his traditional allies — he had argued that funding decisions should be left to the legislative and executive branches.

During a 2016 hearing in the case, Wolf’s lawyers were a part of a defense team that argued that “no individual child has any specific right to an education at all” under the state constitution.

They argued that the legislature must only set up “a system” of education in order to be compliant with the law and that any debate beyond “opening school doors” is a “policy question.”

The state court system has historically agreed that the judicial branch should stay out of education funding debates. But, in September, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed precedent and said the matter was a “justiciable” issue.

That decision propelled the suit into uncharted territory, and Wolf now believes the courts ought to rule on the legality of Pennsylvania’s school funding system.

It’s easy to label the kids who land at Camelot KAPS, a K-7 school in Philadelphia’s Germantown section.

The school educates students with extreme behavioral and emotional needs, many of whom acted out habitually before arriving. By the time many kids make it to Camelot KAPS, misbehavior has become part of their identity.

“I see them becoming more aware of it younger and younger,” said program manager Carolyn Abele. “I’m bad. I’m stupid. I don’t know how to do anything right. Nobody likes me.”

The students know, at a young age, that they’re different.

But one of their teachers, Luke O’Brien, wants them to wear that difference with pride. To do that, he helped them create a catchy rap song and music video called “Way Above Average.”

Kemp was a 9th grader at Barratt Junior High School in October 1967 when the school's vice principal asked him and other members of the stage crew to greet a guest arriving for a special assembly.

Kemp, who played on the school’s basketball team, thought the mystery celebrity might be the Philadelphia 76ers behemoth Wilt Chamberlain.

Then the car door swung open, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped out onto South 16th Street.

“It was amazing,” Kemp said. “I’ll never forget it.”

King was in town for a star-studded rally at the Spectrum, the since-demolished sports arena that King would describe that day as a “new, impressive structure.” Thanks to a connection made by legendary Philly DJ Georgie Woods (“the guy with the goods”), King stopped first at Barratt, which has since been shuttered.

He spoke for just 20 minutes, riveting the mostly black student body with a speech that focused on uplift, racial pride, and putting the onus on them to make better lives.

“I wanna ask you a question,” King began. “And that is: What is in your life’s blueprint?”

Editor's note: Katey McGrath, a public school parent who is quoted in this article, is also the chairwoman of the Notebook's board of directors.

Mercedes White is not a morning person.

Her day begins amid a symphony of alarms, each set about 15 minutes apart in order to keep her on schedule. To make sure that White and her two children — 2-year-old Imir and 9-year-old Iman — make it out the door on time, White's mother delivers daily phone calls.

On good days, they leave their row home in West Philadelphia’s Cobbs Creek neighborhood before 8 a.m., hustling over to Imir’s day care on 52nd Street. Then, the caravan continues 15 more minutes east to drop off Iman.

Waliyyuddin Abdullah’s morning journey starts inside a North Philadelphia row home flanked by vacant lots. While the television and the family parakeet trade chirps in the background, Abdullah herds his 1st grader, Florrie, toward a red SUV parked outside.

On the 15-minute ride southwest, father and daughter run through flashcards scribbled with words that Florrie is learning to read. Each time she completes 200 new cards, Abdullah buys her a present. Not the American Girl doll she wants, but “something reasonable.”

Eventually Abdullah and White converge at Samuel Powel Elementary, a K-4 school just north of Drexel University, where the schoolyard bubbles with happy kids and doting parents.

The first time Abdullah visited Powel, it was this early-morning tableau that won him over.

He saw the attentive parents in the courtyard. He noticed how, when the bell rang for lineup, every child dashed for their class’ assigned place in the courtyard.

“Neighborhood schools are good, but I wanted my children to be around students who are more focused on learning than they are on playing,” Abdullah said.

With temperatures plummeting, facilities workers in Philadelphia’s public schools have dealt with a steady stream of weather-related maintenance issues.

“Our building engineers are working double-time on this,” said School District spokesperson Lee Whack. “It gets cold every winter, but obviously not this cold.”

The District’s facilities team oversees an aging building stock on a limited budget. To replace all the heating systems that the District says are on borrowed time would cost more than $70 million, according to a WHYY analysis.

Building engineers have worked every day since Dec. 26, including weekends, said Whack, to battle the creeping cold. Maintenance workers will be on the job through this weekend and are expected to arrive early Monday morning to detect any new problems.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck effort,” said Whack.

At Solis-Cohen Elementary School in Northeast Philadelphia, heating issues prompted some students to move classrooms, as reported first by CBS3.

Changes to the federal tax code could encourage more Pennsylvania businesses to pump money into K-12 private schools instead of paying state taxes.

That’s according to an analysis by the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which says it discovered an expanded loophole in the new law.

By cross-referencing federal and state incentives, ITEP concluded that wealthy individuals and high-profit businesses across 10 states — including Pennsylvania — may actually make money when they donate to private school scholarship funds.

This would seem like welcome news to the Commonwealth’s private schools and a blow to public schools. At least in the short term, though, it’s unclear whether private schools would receive any benefit, even as their benefactors make a handsome profit.

Eclectic doesn’t begin to describe Kensington High School’s stand at Philadelphia’s annual Career and Technical Education Holiday County Fair.

The engineering students sold pins, placards, and plastic foxes shaped to serve as cellphone holders. Next door, Kensington’s computer students displayed homemade ethernet cables that they constructed by taking apart wire purchased wholesale and rearranging its strands.

Brietny Vega, a senior in the engineering concentration, specialized in some of the school’s more humorous items. One of the placards read, “If you’re looking for a sign, this is it.” She also took a wooden block, painted it red, and emblazoned it with the phrase “your mom.” Why? Because Vega just likes the expression.

The only thing limiting what you’ll find at the CTE County Fair — held Friday at School District headquarters — is the outer bounds of the teenage brain. In other words, there was a lot of funky stuff to be had.

Part of the appeal is that students get to make stuff, do stuff, and otherwise apply their learning. Each year, that includes creating holiday gifts and trinkets for this citywide expo, the proceeds of which go right back into each school’s CTE programs.

Students at the Workshop School in West Philadelphia made their name in past years selling “Jawnaments,” Christmas ornaments carved in the shape of the word “jawn,” that ubiquitous and inscrutable Philly slang. They’ve since added “jawn” menorahs — or “jawn-orahs,” naturally — to their growing craft empire.

A contentious proposal to let students use Pennsylvania funds to pay for private school is getting another chance to make it onto the state Senate floor.

Senate Bill 2 would create education savings accounts — a similar concept to private school vouchers — that would let students in the lowest-performing public schools use the money that the state would have spent on their education for alternative school options, as well as textbooks and other related expenses.

It failed to pass the Senate Education Committee in a tie vote in late October and is scheduled to be reconsidered Tuesday in the same committee.

One possible difference: Sen. Dan Laughlin (R-Erie), one of the only GOP lawmakers to vote against the bill in October, may be moving off the panel.

At the bottom rung of America’s education system, you will find someone like Sandie Knuth.

Knuth teaches English for adult learners on the 10th floor of a Center City office building, in a room of carpeted plainness that suits the invisibility of its inhabitants. The students in Knuth’s class are at varying levels of illiteracy, placed here because an entrance test found that they read below a 3rd-grade level.

They’re here because they think — despite years of setbacks and stacked odds — that they can earn the basic education promised to all Americans. Knuth’s task is to set them on the journey toward that distant goal.

Class begins at 5:30 p.m. on a Wednesday in April.

At least that’s when it’s supposed to begin. There’s a 10-minute grace period for students to arrive — and about a 10-minute grace period informally tacked onto that grace period for those who straggle in even later.

As Knuth, 25, waits for everyone to show up, she scribbles a question on the whiteboard.

The School District of Philadelphia has received applications for nine new charter schools that would, if approved, open up more than 7,000 new charter seats.

The nine applications represent a spike from last year, when just four schools asked for a charter — and only one was approved. The School Reform Commission has final say over application approval, but this is likely to be the commission’s last year before it’s replaced by a local school board.

This year’s applications feature some familiar names, including Mastery, the city’s largest charter network.

Mastery is applying to open Mastery Charter Elementary School in the North Philadelphia neighborhood of Yorktown. If approved, the school would eventually serve 756 students in grades K-8.

A significant chunk of Mastery’s expansion has been through the School District’s Renaissance initiative, in which traditional public schools are turned over to charter operators. Of Mastery’s 14 schools, 13 already existed as District or charter schools before Mastery began running them.

The District, however, has not designated a new Renaissance charter school since the 2015-16 school year and will not convert any District schools into charters this year. For well over a year now, the District has said it’s reviewing the program and will not designate any new schools until that review is complete.

That’s the day his boss, Mastery Charter Schools CEO Scott Gordon, called him with a simple message.

“It’s a go,” Davidson recalls Gordon saying.

Davidson, an assistant principal for school culture at Mastery’s Lenfest campus, had been lobbying Gordon and other administrators at Philadelphia’s largest charter network to start a football program. The purpose wasn’t to achieve gridiron glory, but instead to retain students who had been leaving Mastery for high schools with stronger sports programs.

“A lot of our young men were leaving in high school,” Davidson said.

Football, Davidson argued, would keep kids engaged and enrolled. The Mastery brass agreed, and in the fall of 2011, students from five network campuses merged to form the Mastery North Pumas.

As his speech began, Akbar Hossain paused to take a selfie from behind the lectern at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

With a crowd that big behind him, he explained, who could resist a picture?

In the audience Thursday were nearly 500 students from 65 area high schools, all gathered in Philadelphia for the 11th annual Youth Conference hosted by the Anti-Defamation League. The conference aims to combat hate through a day of workshops and tough conversations.

And that crowd that looked big to Hossain, the keynote speaker, also looked big to organizers. Participation was up 30 percent from the year before.

“A lot of schools are experiencing hate incidents, bias incidents that they didn’t have before or weren’t as aware of before,” said Lisa Friedland, one of the event organizers. “So I think the attraction to having a workshop where kids can come together to challenge these things is a lot more prominent this year.”

This fall, the Philadelphia area has been plagued by an outbreak of racially charged incidents at schools. There’s been racist graffiti in Bucks County, racial slurs hurled in Montgomery County, racist social media posts in Chester County, and a racially charged fight in South Jersey.

Carlos Soriano was entering his 9th-grade year at a vocational school in northwestern Puerto Rico when Hurricane Maria barreled through the island.

The storm wrecked his hometown of Moca, denuding the lush garden that once wove through his school’s campus. He still thinks about the aftermath of Maria – the wreckage of that garden and the looters who ransacked his town.

“I feel safer, but still, like, if there’s a little bit of noise, I still wake up,” he said. “And I wake up like three times a night, usually.”

About a month later — with his school still closed — the aspiring architect left his mother in Puerto Rico and moved in with his dad in North Philadelphia.

He enrolled at Olney Charter High School, a school of about 2,000 in the heart of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community.

In a major speech Thursday, Mayor Kenney will address the future of Philadelphia’s public schools — the latest sign that the system’s governance structure could be in for a major shakeup.

The news was confirmed by Kenney spokeswoman Lauren Hitt.

She said the mayor would discuss the School District’s finances and governance structure, but she would not comment further on speech's content.

Momentum has been growing to replace the School Reform Commission, a five-member body that has overseen the School District since a 2001 state takeover. The SRC is made up of three gubernatorial appointees and two mayoral appointees. Opponents want the SRC to be replaced with a local school board.

The Pennsylvania Senate passed a bill Wednesday that would alter a wide range of state policies related to public education — including the weakening of seniority protections for teachers.

The senators voted 35-15 for the omnibus school code bill, which was passed last week by the House of Representatives. Now it will go before Gov. Wolf, who says he has “serious concerns” about some of its provisions.

The legislation would allow school districts to cite economic distress as a reason for making teacher layoffs. Currently, state policy dictates that layoffs can only occur when enrollment dips, when specific academic programs are slashed, or when schools consolidate. School boards and administrators have felt hemmed in by these regulations, and they laud the added flexibility the bill allows.

Instead of eliminating an entire art, music, or full-day kindergarten program, they say, the new rule opens the door to, when needed, more careful trimming.

“It may allow you to reorganize the staff a little bit more efficiently and cover the courses and teaching assignments that you think would better meet the needs of the kids,” said Mark DiRocco, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators. “It does give districts a little bit more flexibility that way.”

When making layoffs, school districts traditionally abide by strict seniority rules, following a “last in, first out” policy.

This legislation compels districts to use the state’s teacher effectiveness rating system when making layoff decisions. Teachers with “unsatisfactory” ratings for two consecutive years would be let go first, followed consecutively by those with “needs improvement,” “proficient,” and finally “distinguished” ratings.

If all ratings were equal, teacher seniority would continue to dictate layoff order.

“These are some of the accountability measures that our people want — and I think people in general want — in order to ensure that students are getting the most out of the dollars that we’re putting into schools,” said Jennifer Kocher, spokeswoman for Senate Republicans.

Most Republicans in the Senate voted to approve the school code. Three Democrats, including Minority Leader Jay Costa (D-Allegheny), joined them.

The state’s largest teachers' union, the Pennsylvania State Education Association, opposed the move.

“That seems to be a very wrongheaded policy. We ought to be talking about how to improve teacher training and keep good teachers in the classroom rather than look for more expedited ways to get rid of them,” said PSEA spokesman Wythe Keever.

The General Assembly passed a bill to weaken teacher seniority with similar language in 2016, but it was vetoed by Wolf.

Then, as now, the bill says teacher compensation cannot be considered when making decisions and says districts seeking to downsize must also lay off an equal percentage of administrative staff, unless given a special waiver from the state.

The Wolf administration is being tight-lipped about what the governor will do next. When he vetoed the bill last year, he argued that districts already have the power to remove ineffective teachers from classrooms and said the state should not interfere with local staffing decisions based on a teacher evaluation metric that he believes is flawed.

On Nov. 7, Pennsylvanians will vote on a proposed constitutional amendment that could lead to lower property taxes and radically remake how the state pays for its schools.

Or the amendment could pass and change nothing.

It’s an odd set of possibilities: The proposed amendment might have drastic consequences, but it is so laden with what-ifs that even political insiders and policy wonks don’t yet know what to make of it.

“We don’t have a really strong position on this because we could see good things coming out of it and we could see bad things coming out of it,” said Marc Stier, director of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, a liberal-leaning think tank.

In the big picture, the amendment would give legislators unprecedented leeway to reduce or eliminate property taxes. The amendment does not, however, compel legislators to do anything. State lawmakers would have to pass a new law — or set of laws — to take advantage of the possibilities opened up by the proposed amendment.

And it’s unclear what those proposals would be.

Crucially, the amendment would allow lawmakers to make a distinction between residential and commercial properties.

Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission has heard hundreds of presentations over its 16 years, but none as existentially important as the one delivered Thursday by District lawyer Miles Shore.

The topic? How to self-destruct.

Speaking before the five-member panel, Shore explained how the commission could vote itself out of existence.

The commissioners almost certainly knew much of what Shore told them. The significance was that this conversation happened in public, the clearest signal yet that the SRC could soon be replaced by a locally controlled school board.

“The public has been talking around it,” Wilkerson said. “We owe them some indication of what we see as the issues inherent in the decision.”

As Shore explained, a lot has to happen before this bold-but-divisive experiment in state control over Philadelphia’s schools ends.

First, a majority of commissioners have to approve a resolution recommending that the SRC be dissolved. Then, the Pennsylvania secretary of education, currently Pedro Rivera, would have to issue a declaration formally dissolving the commission.

If Rivera issues that declaration by Jan. 1 — 180 days before the end of the school year — the SRC would be dissolved on June 30, 2018. If the process drags on any longer, the SRC would stay in place until at least June 30, 2019.

“We don’t have a timeline,” said Wilkerson. “We don’t have specific dates. But we’re mindful that if it’s gonna happen at all this school year, it would need to happen by the end of December.”

The dissolution of the SRC is a tough political needle to thread, but critics believe they have a shot right now.

Gov. Wolf favors returning the Philadelphia schools to local control. Mayor Kenney supported a return of the District to local control during his campaign, but has more recently wavered on whether it would be a good idea. Activists have been meeting with him to urge a firmer stance, and his spokeswoman, Lauren Hitt, said he has been carefully studying the issue and talking to various stakeholders.

Kenney has expressed concern over the potential political implications and whether it is more likely to ease the District's perennial financial woes.

"First and foremost, he is focused on the District's impending $1 billion deficit — he's heard from a lot of people and done a lot of research on the topic of school governance and he is still considering all of that — but under any model, the District having a $1 billion deficit is a problem," Hitt said via email.

A majority of the board’s current members — Estelle Richman, Christopher McGinley, and Wilkerson — are either Wolf or Kenney appointees. That gives Democrats a solid grip over the outcome of the SRC abolition vote and the declaration process.

If Wolf were to lose his re-election bid in 2018, the forecast for dissolution would look considerably cloudier.

Absent a change in the Philadelphia city charter, the SRC would be replaced by the body that preceded it: a nine-member Board of School Directors appointed by the mayor.

Under the SRC, Philadelphia teachers aren’t permitted to strike, but that provision would be removed if the commission is dissolved. As in other Pennsylvania districts, Philadelphia teachers would be able to strike so long as their strike did not prevent the District from providing students with 180 days of instruction in a school year.

What would not change is the School District’s taxing authority. Because the Philadelphia school board wouldn’t be elected, it wouldn’t have the power to raise taxes. The School District would continue to rely on city and state officials to set its revenue levels, as it does now.

After Shore’s presentation, commissioners asked a handful of questions meant to illustrate — mostly to the audience — these details.

Activists were not mollified. The first public speaker, Samuel Dennis, a student at Science Leadership Academy, demanded a timeline. Wilkerson said that any plan to vote on a resolution would be posted well in advance of a meeting.

Dozens of people stood with raised signs, chanting "tick, tick, tick, tick" to fill out Dennis' allotted three minutes of speaking time, despite Wilkerson's effort to move on to the next speaker.

Later, George Bezanis, a teacher at Central High School and member of the Caucus of Working Educators, said that Wolf was in danger of not being re-elected and that Scott Wagner, a state senator from York running for the Republican nomination, would appoint SRC members who would eviscerate city schools.

Bezanis also derided SRC members Bill Green, who was not present, and Farah Jimenez. Both of them were appointed by former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, whose decisions in 2011 leading to cuts in state and federal education aid led to fiscal crises in Philadelphia and other school districts.

"Please vote to dissolve this sham of a school board," he said.

As an indication of how bitter this issue has become, Jimenez fired back, calling Bezanis a "lazy thinker and orator, who resorts to vitriol and personal attacks. You know nothing about me."

Anti-SRC activists say the commission has accelerated the spread of charters and failed to put the District on solid financial footing, despite initial promises that state control would lead to more state dollars.

But others worry that abolishing the SRC could create an anti-charter climate in Philadelphia and anger Harrisburg Republicans, who ultimately control how much money the state spends on its public schools.

“That’s a huge concern for us,” said Wilkerson of the District’s monetary woes, which include a projected deficit starting in fiscal year 2019. “We cannot have a stable system of public education looking at that kind of deficit. The gains that we’ve made would be wiped out.”

Wilkerson said the SRC had spoken with several groups about dissolution, but would not say whether that includes Republican leadership.

“I think if it’s going to happen in a way that promotes stability, we have to talk with everybody,” Wilkerson said. “So there’s a whole host of conversations I won’t go into.”

•••

The SRC also voted, 3-1, Thursday to not renew and to revoke the charter of Richard Allen Preparatory Charter School in Southwest Philadelphia, which has been operating for 17 years.

A vocal contingent of parents and students showed up to support Richard Allen, describing it as a caring and successful school. And founder and longtime CEO Lawrence Jones said the charter “was not treated fairly” in the renewal evaluation process.

In a presentation, DawnLynne Kacer, head of the charter school office, said the school lagged academically and operationally, citing a decline in proficiency rates in math, reading and science from 2010-11 through 2015-16.

The school was recommended for a one-year renewal in 2014, but the SRC never acted on it. Richard Allen also briefly expanded to include 9th and 10th grades, partly at the behest of the District, but that proved to be too difficult and those grades have been eliminated.

Jones said that this expansion coincided with the drop in scores as the charter was operating a middle and a high school at the same time with just one staff.

The school underwent a “self-imposed turnaround” last year, but the charter office did not take that into consideration in making the recommendation, Jones said. And rather than expand as other charters have done, the school plans to stay small to better serve its students.

The vote does not mean that the school will close anytime soon. There is a requirement for hearings before any final vote is taken, and the option to appeal a negative decision to the state. SRC Chair Joyce Wilkerson took pains to tell Jones that this vote was just a “first step” in a long process that would not necessarily end in closure of the school.

Several speakers also said they have detected a pattern — that the charters being recommended for closure are disproportionately those run by African Americans and educating mostly African American students, while larger white-run charters stay open.

Gerald Johns, a community member, said that he has done an analysis showing that the percentage of students attending minority-run charters has declined from 32 percent to 14 percent.

Commissioner Farah Jimenez cited this pattern in voting to renew Richard Allen’s charter. Although she said that there is “no excuse” for not producing good academics, “it is difficult for me as I continue to see minority-led charters be the ones shut down.” Hers was the only vote to renew the charter.

For decades, Philadelphia’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) High Schools have been among the city’s most desirable, attracting motivated students from every neighborhood.

And for years, they’ve been able to cull their students, discarding applicants with poor grades, poor attendance, or even just a poor interview.

All of that, however, is about to change.

Starting with this year’s eighth graders, the school district of Philadelphia’s four CTE high schools — Murrell Dobbins, Swenson Arts and Technology, A. Philip Randolph, and Jules E. Mastbaum — will admit students via lottery. There will no longer be any admissions criteria other than students showing interest.

If there are too many students for the number of seats available, high achievers will have no advantage over those who struggled in lower grades.

District leadership says the move is about fairness. By shedding admissions criteria, officials say, these schools can serve all interested students, rather than casting aside those who may have tripped up in seventh or eighth grade.

“This is all about creating access for children and making sure that regardless of where children live they have access to some of our more successful programs,” said superintendent Dr. William Hite. “There’s a lot of interest in CTE. We have children on a wait list, we have CTE programs that are not filled.”

But critics believe the shift threatens the vitality and quality of successful schools, essentially turning them into new versions of the come-one-come-all neighborhood high schools that many consider the city’s worst.

Alumni unite

“It would change the whole tone of the school,” said Connie Little, a 1965 Dobbins grad. “It’s like the want to make it a neighborhood school. [Dobbins] is not a neighborhood school.”

Little, a long-time aide to former Mayor John Street, and other Dobbins alum are vowing to fight the change.

“When we go to a fight, we come prepared,” Little said. “And we’re prepared to win.”

What seems, at surface, a technical question about high school admissions policies is actually a referendum on equity and excellence in a school district struggling to balance the two.

Earlier this year, the Pew Charitable Trusts published a report on Philadelphia’s free-wheeling high school choice system, where students can pick among special admissions schools such as Central and Masterman, citywide admissions schools such as Dobbins, and neighborhood high schools.

Each school has its own criteria, and this complicated setup systematically disadvantages certain students, Pew found. In particular, Latino students whose credentials qualified them for top schools tend not to even apply. And the city’s most selective, academically focused schools are disproportionately white and Asian.

The city’s four CTE schools — which were designed to focus on vocational training — accept applicants from all over the city, but have a lower academic bar than special admissions schools. At Dobbins, for instance, applicants must have A’s, B’s, or C’s, no more than 10 latenesses, and no negative disciplinary reports on their most recent final report card. Applicants also must submit to an interview before hearing whether they’ve been accepted.

In 2015, the year of the Pew study, Dobbins received 1,601 applications and accepted 687 students. Other CTE schools also rejected hundreds of applicants. Among citywide admissions schools, Philadelphia’s CTE high schools received some of the highest numbers of total applications. And no citywide admissions school rejects more students than Swenson Arts and Technology.

SCHOOL # APPLICATIONS # ACCEPTED ACCEPTANCE RATE

Murrell Dobbins 1601 687 42.9%

Swenson 2533 857 33.8%

Randolph 1055 621 58.9%

Mastbaum 1282 798 62.2%

District officials want to open the doors wider, by both adding seats at CTE schools and shedding the admissions criteria that, they believe, bar too many motivated students from entry.

“Interest is the criteria,” said Hite. “If children are interested in pursuing cosmetology or building trades or culinary arts…I want the children in those programs.”

The superintendent said it’s nonsensical to take children with multiple absences and turn them away from a program that interests them. Rather, the district should be pursuing policies to engage those kids who aren’t lit up by the standard curriculum.

But where district brass see expanded opportunity, Dobbins alum see the continued dilution of a school that was once a bastion of black excellence in long-suffering North Philadelphia.

The new Mastery Cramer Hill Elementary School in Camden cost $34 million to build. It has 80,000 square feet of space, features a green roof, and has a gym that’s earned rave reviews from the school’s 4th graders.

But when officials dedicated the building Tuesday, the star of the show was a chrome cylinder.

School leaders called it a time capsule, but it was more of a timeless capsule.

Instead of filling the vessel with cultural ephemera, students stuffed it with notes about what they wanted for their school and their lives.

Sixth grader Julitza Martinez wants to be a police officer so she can “help the community be a safer place.” Journey Wynn, an 8th grader, plans to be a lawyer. Seventh-grader Naheem Saulters hopes to be a computer engineer or video game designer.

Jayden Gonzalez was stressed all day yesterday about what to write. The 5th grader finally settled on paleontologist.

“When I was little, I was obsessed with dinosaurs,” he said. “And I asked my mom: What’s a person who studies dinosaurs? And she said, paleontologist.”

Some of the notes laid out grand ambitions for musical careers. Others had less romantic — if equally noble — goals.